


Everybody Bursts Into Mad Flames Sometimes

by Austennerdita2533



Series: Sometimes Your Touch Feels Like Teeth: Bloodied By Intimacy [2]
Category: The Originals (TV), The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Amnesiac!Villain Elijah vs. Klaroline, And gets a little complicated, Angst and Feels, F/M, Hayley still dies (she's the major character death), Loss, Rescuing Hope and Roman goes a little awry, Some Humor, TO 5x06 AU, Threats, mild violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-10
Updated: 2018-06-10
Packaged: 2019-05-20 08:49:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14891421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Austennerdita2533/pseuds/Austennerdita2533
Summary: Bad blood and violence seem to pop up for the Mikaelsons everywhere, but this time it shows up in the form of unhinged!amnesiac Elijah. Caroline tries to hold him off while Hayley disbands of Greta, and Klaus ushers Hope to safety. Madness ensues in the fight to keep the Nazi vampires from procuring who, and what, they desire.Can Caroline keep a morally-corrupted Original at bay? Will Klaus be able to protect everyone he cares about?  What will they gain; what may they lose?





	Everybody Bursts Into Mad Flames Sometimes

**Author's Note:**

> Elijah is atypically vengeful and dark in this on purpose partly because of his erased memories, and partly because of other things. I hope he doesn't feel too OOC (I tried my best) and that it all makes better sense by the end? *fingers crossed*
> 
> Happy reading!

Before her stands a stranger—a stranger she once knew. 

Dark hair, shaved chin. Aviator sunglasses tucked into a scooped white collar. Rugged blue jeans. Terse lips curled in impatient distaste. Two whittled fence posts peeking out from underneath too-long sleeves. A leather jacket - simple, black, no designer or brand name anything. It hangs loose from his shoulders to offset two cold, umber eyes which used to pierce the world with such sagacity, with such innate sophistication and reasonability, but now appraise everything around him with something worse than hate, or scorn, or disapproval too marked to miss: apathy.

It’s the last thing Caroline expects to see right now; he, the last person. ( _Especially in freaking jeans, are you kidding?_ ) And she barely chokes down her surprise fast enough to block his path to the house which perches on a small hill behind them. 

“Can I help you?” she says in half-chirp. Tilting her head to the side, she side-steps in front of him, warning him back with a sharp smile. “You look a little lost and I’m a concerned citizen willing to turn you back around.” 

“Move,” the man growls.

“Now, now,” she raises her hands half in defense, half in taunting, “I know your memory’s been swiped, Elijah, (along with your entire history of familial and platonic feeling), but I thought you of all people would still bother with civilities in any diseased incarnation of yourself? There aren’t any dangling on your lips now, though, huh? Shame. A true shame.”

“I said _move_!”

“Wow, really? No Miss Forbes? No ‘ _it’s nice to see you again_ ,’ Caroline?” She wags her finger and tuts, still shuffling her feet; still refusing to let him pass. Determined to give them more time to escape to safety. “I know my face jars something in you, faint and faded though the recollection may be given the circumstances.” 

“You talk too much.”

“Hey! That’s rude,” she says tartly and pouts. “I’ve always considered you to be the only Mikaelson with any manners, but man, oh man! What a disappointment you are today, I’ve got to say.”

“Stop. Tell me where he is, where he’s taken them,” Elijah says while his knuckles whiten and his jaw ticks. His fingers curl into fists around one of the stakes, itching to strike. Stab. Silence. And he’d do it, too - oh, he wants to do it - to know how her fire and sugared spice will bubble against his teeth after a fatal bite - but he resists because she holds the missing pieces. She’s the only one here who knows how to procure what he and Antoinette still need.

“Pfft, yeah, like I’d tell you anything in your state.” Caroline laughs like the idea is preposterous. Insane. Like it’s the funniest joke in the history of the world. “I mean, I deserve at least a _please_ for that kind of information, don’t you think? For old time’s sake and everything.”

“I’ve had enough of these idle games, Little Miss Sunshine. Where is he?” Elijah snarls again. This time with patience fraying into vein-pulsed rage and fangs descending. “WHERE!?”

Caroline’s shoulders straighten here, and her eyes burn so hot they almost hiss at him when she digs her heels into the grass to offer him a pert quirk of her mouth in opposition; her voice swapping out joviality for severity in the smoothest of transitions.

“As I said already, _Señor_ Impolite,” she says with a click of her tongue, “I won’t reveal a single damn thing to you about your brother’s next location. Not here, not when you’re like this. Nor will I won’t inconvenience the other people you still love somewhere in that thick, muddled skull of yours by making this mission easy for you. Whatever it is. So put that on a discarded daylight ring and smoke it!” she adds with a huff and a cock of the hip. 

“Fine.” A stake loosens from his sleeve. He brandishes it in his hand; twirls it like a baton on his palm. The movement is slow and practiced because whether or not he’s aware of his Original history, he’s wielded weapons like this one for centuries. “If that’s how you wish to play it.” 

“Likewise.”

Elijah pauses to scratch a thumb across his jaw. Then he sniffs before he raises harsh lashes to her face, 

“Take it from a man who’s wasted centuries: you will not triumph,” he says. “That man - my so-called brother - will bleed you of any goodness you possess; he’ll stifle any happiness you find, so do yourself a favor and free yourself from his tyranny now. He is not worth an ounce of your time or protection. And he never will be.”

“You’re wrong. You don’t truly believe that,” she shakes her head and sighs. “You’re so wrong I just—I don’t know how you’ll recover from all the regret and guilt that’s bound to follow once you regain your old attachments again.” 

He remains impassive. Unmoved.

“Let me by, Caroline. He must pay for his crimes.”

“I said -” her teeth clench; her features darken, “- no!” A blur against the sky, she vamps across the yard to block each and every one of his advances. She shoves against his chest, swipes at his athletic kicks with her boot heels, and snaps out with her fangs like a guard dog to keep him back. Away.

“His worth is mine, and mine alone, to decide. You got that, E?” she says in an obnoxious way that mocks his new nickname pointedly, unapologetically; her veins rippling across her cheekbones for extra measure. “It’d be best for you not to forget it. You know - like, ever.”

“Well, then—” He takes a step back, his forehead pinched in mounting irritation. “I guess we have nothing further to discuss, do we?” 

“Nope.”

After a shrug and a look of pity, “I’m afraid this pretty little blonde of yours has left me no choice here, Hybrid,” he announces in a loud, reverberating voice. 

Elijah speaks to the air, to the clouds forming shapes over their heads, but his eyes sweep across the property. His ears prick as if they wait for his brother’s howled outcry to sound on the wind in the seething, murderous way he’d once been so accustomed to hearing, and also to preventing. There is no movement anywhere except where the sun crests over the hill, however. All the purples and oranges dancing with shadows to tint the land like a bruise. There’s no sound besides the screeching tires of a Camaro on the highway ten miles distant. There’s nothing else around besides a dirt road, a decrepit house, and a stubborn, sassy girl poised between them.

Thirty more seconds pass before Elijah’s gaze settles back over on Caroline. It’s another thirty-five seconds after that before he’s rife enough with detached predation, hunger, and resolve to act. 

He levels his chin once he decides. And as he charges forward with a stake positioned for the spot where two rings dangle against her chest, above her heart, the next words to leave his throat burst forth in grave monotone,

“Time to die,” he says.

* * *

Bad blood and violence follow Klaus everywhere.

It’s a foul shadow chomping at the base of his achilles heel hoping to munch its way through to destroy all he cherishes because he’s a man forged from sin, dark magic, and bones of adaptability. A combination which shouldn’t be allowed to exist in this world unless it’s broken - purged - from the outside in with all the dominion he possesses slit from his tendons by his foes in fury. Greed. Fear. Hate. Or envy. It’s a javelined spear which spills his loved ones’ blood onto cobblestone paths or fried country grasses in red river rain because he somehow arrives too late to keep the bolt from striking, the lightning. 

His worst fears flood the land as a result. Thunder rumbles overhead to plunge everyone’s lives into peril at once, pellets of hail dropping like canons. Erupting the earth to widen the crossable distance between them. The sky is a jaw full of teeth which drools something about abominations, or about purity that must crunch all twisty tornados dead in their tracks. 

A storm of hell descends while he’s distracted and struggling against his enemies’ vengeance, limbs extended in four different directions; his arms flying while eyes hybridize with focus, anger, so that someone who matters is always left exposed. Vulnerable. Like a flapping thread which spools from the corner of a whirlpool.

It’s simple math for him, truth be told. It’s even simpler science. There are too many holes, and Klaus cannot defend them all on his own. It doesn’t matter how hard he tries because somebody always slips over a ledge and falls flat into physics’ grasp. Gravity claiming what he’s dropped, who he’s lost. And it’s all his fault. 

_His fault, his fault, his fault._

The rising tide of everyone’s screams and taken or deflected blows creates a wave of horror Klaus cannot climb over with blood-drenched hands, with slippery soles, and it makes it impossible for him to catch every person he cares for before they sink, before they drown to the bottom of a gorge he’ll never be able to breach with one arm extended. He needs more time, more time, more time. He needs more bloody time! _Please_. 

But what happens if there isn’t any? What comes after the world fissures open with the intent to swallow up the good in everything? What then, what does one do next? 

Klaus clamors, he claws his way over to them. 

He packs his unconscious daughter into a car seat next to Roman and Marcel then watches the SUV disappear down the lane, its wheels screeching as it ushers two people he loves toward home and security. He turns back to the house afterwards to collect the two women he’s left idling on the estate five miles away, who each scan for more threats in his absence as they wait, only for the back door to splinter wider the closer he roams. It chips next. Before, finally, it busts open with a loud _crack_ to shoot wood and body parts loose. 

Debris launches forward with such force that his arms shield his head in reflex while he rolls to the left to avoid a collision with an airborne Hayley. A fate Klaus escapes, but barely. 

He pushes up onto his elbows. When he does, the heat from her near-miss manages to singe some hairs on the back of his neck, chafing them down to stubs of red. A hammer thuds loud in his ears as he blinks in the nightmare which unfolds before him: the mother of his child sailing through the backyard tangled in rods of fire. And Greta. And a self-sacrifice too awful to believe. 

It’s bloody horrifying to behold, truly. 

The sunlight pours over Hayley’s skin like gasoline, and she’s suddenly a molting phoenix: red fades to orange, and orange dwindles to gray which then darkens to black. All of her life’s color draining in seconds until she’s gone. Dust. Dead. 

And there Klaus is left to witness it all. 

There, on a frayed patch of yard, beneath the stark midday sun, Klaus lies agape in the filth of his own making yet again. A Father of Cinders. An Usher of Ruin. The smell of Hayley's charred flesh quickly becoming another orange stink he must learn how to breathe in and out of his nostrils like flame, like ash—the crispest of all things he’s failed to save for his family’s sake. 

Sure, why not add another disaster to the ever-multiplying list, he thinks? Why not shoulder all the responsibility for a tragedy from which Hope will never recover? Elijah, either, if he returns to himself someday. How can he not assume the blame for this?

_His fault, his fault, his fault._

The temptation to remain crumpled on his knees right now is as potent as the bourbon Klaus needs to slick his throat, to numb the ache in his head, but a faint voice gusts into the clearing at that moment which is equal parts sonorous and soft when it chokes out defiance, strength, and fortitude into the air; and the sound causes him to scrabble to his feet with the speed of a cheetah to pursue the last hope here he knows he can’t bear to lose. Let alone whom. 

Fifty paces hence takes mere seconds, but they feel like decades. 

Her still-ticking pulse becomes the drumbeat each of his strides produces as he dashes to the front of the house in a blur of alarm. It’s what keeps him breathing. She’s what keeps him moving when his panic thumps so strong he grinds the enamel on his molars off clean. 

The world collapses and narrows until her loudening voice is all Klaus hears, until her golden head snaps in his direction again because she’s the only thing he wants to see. She’s the balm to all his monstrosity, to his debilities, and he needs her. He needs her alive more than anything.

Still, a roar from the wolf deep in his chest is not enough to convey all the emotion he feels. There’s no lid to quiet the pain. There’s no coffin to smother it…all of that rage. 

Caroline will not be torn from him, too. _No, no, no. Never._ Not today she won’t, not in a hundred million more lifetimes if he can prevent it. And he bloody will—

Even if it’s the last thing in this life he’s meant to do.

* * *

Dust and blood coat her slacks after some minutes of vampire vs. vampire tousling. Prone on her back with gravel stuck in her hair, Caroline fends off her attacker with another boot kick to the groin followed by a swift _clonk_ to the jaw.

“You know, I should be pissed about how many of you asshole Mikaelsons have tried to kill me over the years, but do you know what? I’m no damsel,” she says, tumbling into a squat. “I’m not too dainty to fight back. So go on—” Her words are clipped, her breath heavy with exertion. “Go on and hit me with your best shot, you Wrangler-wearing amnesiac!”

“Interesting choice of last words.” 

A stake gripped firmly in each of his fists, Elijah swings down with the right one. It rips off a small patch of her skin with her black sleeve. Since she's evaded the more direct hit by wheeling to the right, however, the wound heals quickly.

Caroline laughs. It’s a taunting, corrosive sound. 

“You wish those were my last words, buddy.” 

“Chatter all you want, girl. But know this,” he says in a tone as equally dispassionate as it is menacing,“I’ll still kill you to help my family dispose of the Mikaelsons’ mixed blood. We will rid the world of their plague one way or another.” 

“God, will you listen to yourself right now!?” 

Using her shoulders as leverage, Caroline pushes up to slug him across the face for a second time. Elijah spits blood from the corner of his mouth after the blow knocks him backwards. Still standing, however, his jaw taut, he looms forward again in seconds.

“Those people are not your family,” she says. “You’re freaking brainwashed!”

“No. What I am is free.” 

“Great. So you’re deluded, too, apparently. That’s freaking fantastic,” Caroline grumbles. Scooting upwards onto her elbows, she strikes out at his ankle with her heel but misses it by inches.

“Luckily for me, your family’s long range psychosis (your real family, I mean) is well-worn and likely to flare every now and again, so I’m used to this kind of thing. I’m stronger because of it. Smarter, too,” she adds as her fingers coil beneath her. Looking up, her lips twitch before she hurls a handful of gravel into Elijah’s face without warning. 

Even though he blocks most of it with his forearms, some of the rubble stings his eyes long enough for her to lurch for one of his weapons, which she promptly deposits into his gut. The action drops him to his knees in momentary agony, cursing. 

“That may be so,” he grunts, his tongue licking over his mouth roughly, “but I’m afraid even with all that expertise, and despite all of your self-proclaimed Mikaelson experience—” 

Elijah’s quicker to recover than Caroline anticipates. He grabs her by the hair before she can flash away, throwing her against the porch railing with a loud _smash_.

“You’ll never be able to beat me.” It’s whispered almost like a caress. “You can’t win this fight,” he says.

“Then I suppose I’ll have to die trying, won’t I?” Caroline fires back.

“Die?” Elijah snickers. Blood - his blood - drips from the spike he’s dislodged from his ribs. He angles it at her chest again. “Oh, die you will.”

With him towering above her once more, his fangs out, sharpened with fatal purpose, he sneers as Caroline crab walks backward to the first step, which she then uses as a ledge to erect herself back onto her feet with fluid grace.

“Pardon the intrusion,” a voice cuts in at that moment with a low growl, not sorry at all, “but I wouldn’t underestimate that one if I were you. She’s made of the sweetest flames."

“And I’ll roast you for one false move, pal,” Caroline pipes in with a huff.

Squinting, Elijah regards her like she’s a cockroach. 

“Death would suit you rather nicely, I think. Yes,” he hisses, “imagine the silence I’ll achieve with it soon.”

She raises her chin to fix him with a look of incredulity at this. It’s a look that, for all its azure ferocity and resistance, would impale his eyeballs to the nearest fence post if it could; but also would like to bludgeon open his head with the plume of a feather to reinstate all his emotional memories first. 

“Enough!” the intruder exclaims. He grabs the Original by the shoulder at the same time Caroline rips a spoke free of the railing. “Threatening her life would be ill-advised for anyone under normal circumstances, but this…why - this is—are you bloody insane?"

“Come, come, why not watch while I suck the last visage of light from her veins? A few slurps is all it’d take to silence her forever,” Elijah says in the voice of a stranger, in the voice of an adversary. His lips curl in sinister delight. “What a lovely thought that is.”

“I said _enough_!” the trespasser growls again. Louder this time. Zooming closer, he’s a ball of temper and anxiety as he clutches the other man by the leather lapels. 

“There are limits to the wrath I am able to contain even for you…” he draws out the last bit for emphasis, the vein in his forehead throbbing as Caroline tucks the weapon into her jacket, “brother.”

“Does this girl mean so much to you, Hybrid?” Elijah says.

In answer, Klaus hurls him like a dart at the barn doors across the yard, “Do. Not. Test. Me,” he howls. 

Dropping over top of him in a flurry of color, and darkness, and fury that’s hardened his eyes into an inferno of hybrid gold, he kicks through the wreckage until he reaches Elijah’s proneform beneath a heap of crumpled lumber. He lifts him up by the throat. Then he slams his head hard against a lone standing beam, thrusting a finger into his face. 

“There has been enough blood spilt here today, Elijah. Too much.” 

“Tell me,” he answers with a strangled cough and a blink, “am I supposed to care?” 

“Klaus, stop, you can’t talk to him. He’s wily and unhinged like this. A morally skewed prick. Just look at his dragging hems, for crying out loud!” Caroline says as she approaches from behind. “That’s proof enough he’s been mentally and magically corrupted by them.”

“Our family has been fractured beyond repair,” Klaus continues without hearing her. He looks a little crazed as he shakes his brother in place like it’ll somehow refasten those loose screws in his brain. “Hayley’s gone - the mother of my child, the woman you loved…is dead. Dead! You let her fall straight into our enemy’s lap!”

“But so help me, I will wring your wretched neck—“ His voice grows thick; heavy, and it hurts to swallow, “I will chain you inside a box (which is something I swore I’d never do to someone in this family again) before I allow you to take Caroline away, too.”

It’s in that moment, just as the sun eclipses behind a cloud to dim the atmosphere like an omen, the wind punting flower petals through the air like knives which sting when they kiss a piece of exposed skin, that Elijah’s features contort into something worse than inscrutable. They refashion, instead, into something aggressive and deranged.

“Her shrieks will sound so much more delicious to me when you fail to save her now, Hybrid,” he says. “I admit I can hardly wait for the symphony.”

“Screw you!” Caroline shouts back.

That’s when he lurches forward to grab Klaus by the elbow. With unimaginable force, he yanks. Fracturing it with a violent twist. 

The action frees his two legs, which had been dangling in the air where he was tacked only seconds ago, so that he’s able to kick out at his foe’s knees. Unbalancing him enough to bite his shoulder and push backwards against his chest. Elijah nearly shirks the arm which is swinging back at him in retaliation, but not quite. 

Hybrid claws catch his face even though he ducks. Like hooks, they dig and pry into his skin because he’s still within range and Klaus is livid, monstrous beyond legend; leaving cursive track marks from Elijah’s eyebrow all the way down through the white of his collarbone. 

Still, the other man’s wide-arced punches leave Elijah with an advantage in the end. One carries too far to the left and exposes his side. Before Klaus can stop him, therefore, and before he can recover in time to parry the attack, he upends him with a knee that breaks his nose and reduces his vision to black dots and sprouting stars. It gives him ample time and opportunity to pin him to the ground with the loose barn beam at his feet. Piercing it through his kidney.

That’s how Elijah leaves him, too: sprawled, writhing, raging, helpless.

It’s why he turns his attentions back to Caroline with keener insight. There’s a patient but exacting grin on his lips as he lays chase again because it’s her vs. him for a moment, and there’s a fierceness blooming across her face that says ‘ _you’ll pay for that dearly, jerk face._ ’ It feeds his muscles with adrenaline; it plies his mind with rigor. He craves the rush like heroin.

For it’s here, after everything, that he truly understands Caroline won’t leave Klaus under any circumstances. For, no matter how damning the danger grows, and no matter how stacked-against the odds are in her favor, he sees she’ll leap straight into hell itself if it’ll offer her the slightest chance to reach him again.

How could he have missed this? How could he not have noticed the jewel she’s concealed behind her incessant prattle? 

_His worth is mine to decide,_ she’d said to him earlier. _Mine._

Her words reverberate with too strong a connotation to demarcate their connection into anything less significant than lovers. _Lovers_. It makes Elijah feel like an imperceptive fool.

That’s why it doesn’t matter how her death happens now, he’s decided. 

He’s realized it’s not important whether he skewers her pink flesh into shoelace peels with his teeth, or detaches her bouncing blonde head from her shoulders with the branch of a tree. It matters not if he cuts through her innards, roasts her in the sun, sucks out her sweet flames through her carotid artery, or wraps her wagging tongue around a heart that no longer beats. All that’s necessary is for her life to end here. Today. All that’s required is for Klaus to be parked in a front row seat, powerless and wretched because he’s piked through the torso, watching—

Watching as Elijah wrenches this girl away from him irrevocably.

The thought makes the elder Original smile. 

What is better retribution, after all? What could be better justice for the man who’s already tried to snuff out the love which exists between he and Antoinette? _The selfish, sabotaging man_. How much easier will it be to extract what they need from him afterwards? Once she’s dead. 

Ah, the glory of it! The honor! Punishment for both the Hybrid’s meddling and his impurity will be much more satisfactory to achieve now that he knows the best way to inflict it—personally.

“Listen for the crescendo, will you? I believe it’s my favorite cadence of killing,” he says, glancing at Klaus over his shoulder to add drolly, “ _brother_.”

“No more of this! No more of this, damn you!” he replies as his fingernails bruise the land where he’s still impaled.

“Klaus! Listen to me, please!” 

Like a whip, Caroline’s voice cracks at the same moment gray rain begins to spit on top of them from stratus mouths. The wind gusts so hard it vibrates with staffs of yellow and blue and shatters all the remaining windows in the house. The space around them transforms into a whistling hellmouth of tension and grief, of anger and estrangement, and of terror too palpable to bear, in seconds. 

And what’s worse, is that the worst of it all feels tragically possible now because Elijah’s all _coup de force_ with shards of wood flying everywhere as his skewed morality and loyalty to the wrong family helps to move his feet like a rabid beast’s. Meanwhile, Caroline’s zooming forward through a fang-bared maze and cycloning storm with eyes that scream out, then pour into the beam stuck in Klaus’ back almost in elegy. 

The inflamed blue of her eyes drenches his soul in any number of ways, because what if he can’t shatter this obstacle soon? What if he doesn’t…what if she…how can he not save her? How?

Leaping over Klaus’ arms at that moment, she flashes away with Elijah on her haunches. Then, without breaking stride, she reaches into her jacket pocket before she glances back at the prone Original long enough to demand for him to understand. Pleading for him to place faith and trust in what her words mean, “The jeans, Klaus! The freaking jeans!” she yells as she jets in front of him one last time.

“So wasteful,” Elijah says as he nearly hooks an arm around her neck in victory, “since those truly will be your last words this—”

_Trip_

_Stab_

_Snap_

He’s unconscious and face-first on the ground in seconds. A railing spoke from the porch jabbed between his two shoulder blades.

“I think not as much as you’ll regret being brought down by your own poor fashion choices. Compel yourself a tailor next time. I mean, _really_ ,” Caroline says over his body with a triumphant hum, cuffing up his baggy pant legs. She pops up from a crouch to take Klaus’ offered hand with a weak smile afterwards.

“That was inspired thinking on your part,” he says.

“Nah, not really. _Legally Blonde_ obsession simply served me well today is all.”

“Elle Woods has nothing on you, love. Believe me.”

“Yeah, well, no way was your brother getting away with saying I talk too much. No man would. Besides,” she continues with a snort, “you did warn him not to underestimate me.”

“That I did.”

After they tie Elijah to a tree out of sight with the vervain chains in her trunk, intent on keeping him subdued until their non-Hollow’d reinforcements arrive to take him away, they amble back toward the house.

“Thanks for the tripping assist, by the way,” Caroline says.

Shrugging, Klaus slinks an arm around her waist like it belongs there, “It was the least I could do.”

“Come on, teamwork suits us. Don’t deny it,” she says with a bump of her hip.

“I’m not.”

“What’s wrong?” she asks suspiciously, her heightened senses on red alert again because of his abstract demeanor. “Is there another—”

“No,” he cuts in, his thumb hooking more firmly into her belt loop, “it’s nothing.”

Caroline rolls her eyes at his flat, disgruntled tone, at the way he sighs before disappearing into the enigmatic labyrinth of his mind where she can’t follow, so she stops them on a seared patch of sidewalk. Then crosses her arms.

“Look, I know me being the one to stab him wasn’t ideal,” she says, feeling his growing intensity, “but with the beam already starting to splinter in your back like that, I knew if I ran him close enough you’d be able to topple him so I could—”

Klaus shuts her up with a kiss.

The timing of it is bad. (Couldn’t be worse, really.) It’s totally inappropriate considering how fraught the past twenty minutes have been with the threat of magic and wolf-binding, with a rescue of innocents that’s succeeded but still reeks of flesh and bloodshed, of muck, and of family wreckage that will never be able to be repaired because it’s been ripped off the hinges. It’s been burnt to shreds with a house and a barn that’s no longer standing upright. 

There’s so much to discuss, too. There are so many decisions to be made about what to do next… 

Hayley? Hope? Elijah? New Orleans? 

Do they collect the girl’s ashes before they leave; and if so, in what? How will Hope react once she awakes? What all did Roman know about this? Can they find a witch/Marcel team to fix Elijah’s mind, or is it hopeless to try now that so much of him has been magically reconditioned? Should she call Bonnie, or would that cross some kind of line? And, like, could the sky stop weeping blood already because - Mikaelson curse or not - who the hell needs all this staining and stickiness on their designer clothes?

…And on and on and on the questions flow!

The biggest problem now, though, is that Klaus’ kiss is so hot and crushing with feeling that it’s halted the million-and-a-half thoughts buzzing through Caroline’s head which still need solving. She’s too distracted, too lost to the sweet but scraping taste of his tongue in her mouth. 

He makes love to her lips in a way no one but an artist knows how. There’s an array of color, meticulousness, delicacy, and swooping claim to be laid down on her wherever she allows him to paint with his kisses. And before she knows it, before she can locate her sense of rationality long enough to steady her pulse again and stop this, her fingers are burying themselves into the curls at the nape of his neck to draw him closer, and closer; the giant butterfly flip in her stomach telling her only one thing:  

 

> _Screw it. Let the questions wait for awhile._

So she does. 

They do.

**Author's Note:**

> So, whew! This is a LOT different from the kind of thing I usually write with all the fighting and death threats and all that, so I'm nervous about how it turned out. Again, I tried haha.
> 
> Thoughts? Comments are wonderful.
> 
> Thank you for reading.
> 
> xx Ashlee


End file.
